By Bernie Bell

Since I stopped eating meat there have been two things I’ve missed – chicken breast with mayonnaise.  And – bacon butties.  The bacon butties of my youth – sliced white bread, yer actual butter, crispy bacon and tomato ketchup which could only be coaxed out of the bottle by whacking it on the bottom!

I missed them, but wasn’t prepared to eat…that meat.

Recently, Mike found this in the Stromness Co-op….

Pretend meat doesn’t always taste anything like what it’s meant to taste like – and sometimes can be a bit challenging on the digestion – if you see what I mean.   But we thought it was worth giving it a go, and it’s delicious! 

It’s not exactly like bacon – that would be a tall order, but the taste is something like smoked bacon, and – it didn’t challenge the digestion.

Brown bread instead of white, Utterly Butterly instead of butter, pretend bacon, and ketchup from a squirty bottle – different – but yummy. 

There was enough in the packet for a butty lunch, then a meal in which we fried some chopped up mushrooms, red/green peppers, fresh tomatoes, garlic and the pretend bacon in olive oil, then stirred that into spaghetti.  Another yummy feed – and nothing got hurt in the process.